


Sundog

by snagov



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Feelings Realization, First Kiss, M/M, Pining, Romance, Sort Of Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:35:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24095932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: You cannot look into the sun without blinding yourself; Tony Stark has never been good with rules.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 6
Kudos: 40





	Sundog

Have you ever really looked at the sun?

It’s dangerous to look too closely, it is dangerous to stare. The ultraviolet light floods the retina, burns the tissues out, layer by layer until there is nothing left. They call it solar sunburn, _solar keratitis_. It can take up to twenty-four hours to set in, the sensitivity to light coming first, the pain only after. If stared at too long, however, the bright rays can demolish the cones and rods, carving out a blind spot to live within. Sometimes, it is permanent. Tony knows you shouldn’t stare at the sun. (He has never been good with rules.)

Sometimes the world shakes him up a bit. It is _brighter_ and _rougher_ and _louder_. When everything sharpens, just a little bit, Tony talks even faster. He tries to drown out everyone and everything with his speech. He skates from glacier to glacier on words, slinging idioms and wisecracks. If he can stay one step ahead of the _too much_ , then it won’t hit him. (It always hits him. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can fix it with scotch. A couple of drinks will do fine, pop a nice ice cube in and knock it back. Lagavulin, 20-year.)

He can sure as hell talk a lot, talk a big game, talk too much. Words never matter, no one ever listens to them anyway. When they do matter, he has no practice with them, he picks the wrong ones out of the box, puts them on his tongue where they don’t quite fit. _Look, we’re trying to fight this bastard, Rogers. if anyone wants to know how to swing dance, Ice-Nine, we’ll ask you, capiche?_ (God, the way Rogers had looked at him, disappointed. Had curled up that perfect cupid’s bow of a top lip, the slight gold hint of a beard just starting to emerge, The cold in his eyes, probably still stuck there from his time in the popsicle-slammer.)

That wasn’t what he had meant; that wasn’t what he had wanted to say. The real words sit in his mouth like a pill. He does not spit them out; he does not swallow them down. _Wait,_ he wants to say, _come back._

_Let me tell you about a boy._

He is always _too much._

One property of light is surprise. It can appear out of anywhere. The pop of headlights over a hill, a sudden flashlight, the opening of a door. Steve Rogers, _stupid assfuck Captain America,_ stares at Tony from across the counter. (Tony does not remember him entering the kitchen. Surely there would have been noise, a shift in dust, a disturbance of light? No, light does not disturb light.)

“I thought you had quit drinking,” Steve says, murmurs even. The man should not be allowed to pitch his voice so low. It is _unfair._ He studies the man like taking in Michelangelo’s _David._ There are fewer discrepancies than there should be, the way the shoulder and leg muscles ripple, even under the green cotton shirt which stretches to fit him. The even tan, the eyes (blue as the sea, blue as his first car).

“Yes, well, Rogers, the thing about quitting is that no one ever likes a quitter.”

Everyone always talks about how easy it is to read Steve. The golden boy, the American hero, the open book. Tony’s fingers twitch. They ache for a wall to punch, a napkin to shred. The nature of his own genius was a natural fact of the Universe. His inventions are the world standard, he’d mastered integral calculus by age fifteen, he can speak six languages fluently. And then there’s Steve _fucking_ Rogers, who is child’s play to everyone else and Tony stares at him in fury, in frustration, the single godforsaken problem that he cannot decipher, decode, cannot _figure out._ Steve makes a strange face, a quiet sort of smile, and runs his fingers through his hair.

“Do you want me to keep you company?”

There are mysteries in the world, things beyond human comprehension. Tony is not a man who has ever left a mystery alone. Five years old, turning over every stone to see what’s underneath. At thirteen, exploring every cave. _But I need to know._ His need to _understand_ is consumptive. Age twenty-four, pouring over the proofs for Fermat’s Last Theorem, the first successful proofs released in 1994 by Andrew Wiles, solving 358 years of frustration by mathematicians. He doesn’t understand it right away, so he lets his mind float. He cascades over the number theory, the proof by contradiction, Galois representations of elliptic curves. It comes apart in his mind, somewhere in the folds of his grey matter, revealing the truth, the beauty. Tony needs to _know._ (Steve Rogers is a mystery like Fermat’s Last Theorem had been. Others have solved it, Tony waits, trying to let his mind wander, aimless and solving. He waits for the comprehension to wash over him like a wave.)

“No.” _Yes._

_Alright, Tony, what do you do when you don’t understand? Break it down, take it apart. Your name is Steven Grant Rogers. You fought in World War II (I did not). You were born in Brooklyn, somewhere way the fuck out there where the trains hardly run. (I was born in Manhattan, where all the trains run.) Your eyes are as blue as chromium, as the color of a winter sky, the veins on the underside of your wrist (I have looked). You knew my father once, that miserable ice-cold prick of a human being; you know me now. You probably wish I were him. You shit eagles and the American flag. I hate you (I don’t). I’m pretty sure you can bounce nickels off of your chest. You were frozen once, lost and dead. I had an action figure of you once, when I was a boy. Sometimes it hurts to look at you, like you’re too much. Like the sun, which gets caught in your hair._

_You’re too much. Stop looking at me like that._

Steve sits down, pours himself a glass. Tony itches in the silent spaces between them. The air claws at him, at his skin, his throat. _Say something._ “Never pegged you for the strong, silent type, Capsicle.”

Steve shrugs, takes a sip. His eyes close, there is a strange tension in Tony’s stomach. He can’t figure it out. No one else gets under his skin like this, no one else makes him want to slam his fist into their cheekbones, shatter the zygomatic arch, bruise the mouth. He clenches his jaw. “We’re not good at talking. So I figure we just won’t talk right now.”

“What the _fuck_ does that mean, Cap?” Steve says nothing, that casual shrug. Tony swallows, his grip whiteknuckled and blackhaired on the unfortunate glass of scotch.

Staring at the sun will blind you, so he takes side glimpses. He looks quickly, lets the vision come back in a little bit from where he had been blinded. “Look, you want to hate me, it took me awhile to figure that out. So you can hate me. But I’m not going to hate you back, Tony. No matter how much you want me to. You don’t get to control that.”

There is no greater high than the dawning of comprehension. The shift of the sand when his mind grasps at the threads, sews them up again. He sees the words forming a new language, shifting and falling into a syntax he understands, that he’s read before. There is a shift to the light. Perhaps Steve moved (perhaps Tony did). A map falls into Tony’s lap with roads to secret cities, keys to unbroken codes. _Oh,_ he thinks. Steve, shifting away slightly. The kitchen light dancing in his straw-colored hair, eyes wide and pointed at the bottle of Scotch, where his twitching, idle hands pick away at the label. His hands, wide and square and _beautiful,_ with bitten and clipped fingernails, with ragged cuticles. Steve keeps his stress secret, but in the shift of light, Tony sees it laid bare. It is in the tense shoulders, the heavy breath.

Those hands. _Your hands are beautiful._

The unfolding of understanding is always rapid. It multiplies from the various threads, so Tony’s mind, ever-quick, jumps from peak to peak, skates down avalanches. They threaten to bury him. _Not just your hands, eh?_ They’ve always been talking, haven’t they? This whole time, there have been words woven underneath their bitter fights, beneath the razor-edges. These are words not found in dictionaries, they cannot be looked up. They cannot be pushed forth with sound, with our impossibly clumsy human language. If we proceed from Point A (Steve’s hands are beautiful), then it is natural to then follow through to Point B (Steve’s arms are beautiful). Connect the dots. His eyes swallow up, hungry to know. Where does the beauty end? (It does not.) _Fuck, fuck, fuck._

_I want you. Godfuckingdammit. Good job, Tony motherfucking-idiot Stark, absolute king of bad choices. Not king, maybe emperor? What goes higher than emperor, ‘cause fuck, I’m ruler of it all._

The answer is simple, everyone has seen it but him. It is horrifying, embarrassing. Blood rushes to his face, to his neck, his shoulders. It flushes his cheekbones, creates unappealing splotches on his neck. His eyes (brown as treebranches, brown as decaying logs and dead leaves) widen and swallow up the other man, perfect and golden as Ganymede. There are heroes and there are the supporting characters. Tony should never have been a hero, he is nothing without the suit. Captain America, however, well, it comes from _within_.

_I want you._

He is not sure if he is the one making that harsh breathing noise. He wants to check his pulse, it feels out-of-control. He cannot without drawing attention. _Why are you looking at me like that?_ Steve moves imperceptibly closer. They trade body heat, barely inches apart. He can see the gentle lines around the other man’s eyes, the curve of his collarbones just under the cotton shirt, the slight bead of sweat across his forehead.

“Steve - “

“Don’t talk,” Steve says, quiet and urgent, “not right now.” Tony is no fool (except now, a complete fool, drowning and out of his depth). The tractor beam of his eye contact holding Tony there, pinned like an insect to a board, ready to be inspected, disarticulated, broken down. Tony wants to run, he wants to break. He _aches_ and cannot say why. He is horribly sure he knows why. It is loud inside of him, raging. He needs to quiet, he needs a drink, a shower, needs to _talk._ Needs to soften the horrible loudness, the ringing.

A shift, he will never know what came first. Steve moves to him, those beautiful sculptor’s hands coming up into his shirt, fisting as if to clutch furiously, to break something. Keep it still. His mouth pressed to Tony’s, firm and so completely _certain,_ as if it this was breathing, as this was the most obvious thing in the world. Tony opens up beneath Steve, unfurling like a plant turning toward the sun, welcoming the dawn. Bright and beautiful and so _warm._ Someone keens slightly into the other, moaning into the stillness (Tony is horribly sure it is him). _I need you._ His hands come up to either side of the other’s face, cup the square jaw, run greedily through the sun-colored hair.

They gasp at the air when they part. “Fuck,” Tony whispers. Steve grins. It is impish, forthright.

“I’ve been waiting for awhile to do that.” Steve whispers. Tony gapes at him, dark hair falling in his eyes. Fingers already aching to claim, to mark, to _understand._ He can make a pinhole projector, put on filtered glasses. He can learn with other senses, press his ears to the broad chest and listen for heartbeats and circulation. He can read the skin and sinew with his fingers like Braille. There are ways to swallow down the sun.

“If you don’t kiss me again right now, you lug, I swear to God that I -”

There are ways to shut Tony Stark up.


End file.
